Chapter Text
A simpleton —Criston Cole’s handsome face flashes in his mind’s eye— would surely liken it to copper. Spilled upon the desk as if the hand of God had knocked over his chalice, glinting nearly afire in the sunlight that creeps through blinds she never closes fully, thick locks of it resting on a pulpy arm he’d dutifully gnaw at until the bone gleams white, her hair makes him think not of the prosaic dullness of electrical wiring but of the briny lure of the ocean.
His days at Harrenhal were spent amidst ancient equipment that proved to be tremendously sturdy, and with nothing better to do, he set out to conduct varying experiments of varying degrees of success, the extraction of bromine being one of his favorites. Extraction itself is a process that fascinates him: to draw out, to pull, to separate, to sunder; to make un-whole, to rend —a violent act by principle, an external force that disrupts an internal balance, that inflicts itself upon a reluctant system until it has been, if not wrenched apart, altered by an agent it finds itself unable to fend off. Not even bromine, with its high volatility and corrosiveness, is safe from hands that seek and pry and sever; it too is coaxed into surrendering its elemental self, to be not only uncloaked but tamed.
Bromine, so abundant in the waves that lap and seek to engulf, heedless of his body’s will or might —he is careful not to wade past the point of self-reliance, though the warmth and the salinity do alleviate the perennial ache of his lame leg and he always wants to laugh at the paradox of risk and remedy. And mighty as they are, the waves end up disgregated and contained, their substance probed and their elements seized. The ocean, uncaring, lets him plunder all he is able to carry.
The bromine he keeps stored in ampules he fashioned out of test tubes is just as indifferent; the fumes that singe the soft tissue of his throat subdued and the blood-hued liquid that blisters his skin confined, potted flowers he plucked not from soil but from sea. One such ampule, encased in pastel-yellow resin, rests on her desk, near cuticles that sport a similar tinge to the dense crimson within, though much less noxious were he to lick them with the whole length of his tongue.
Not even the tap of his cane along the stone rouses her from sleep. His approach, while not stealthy, is unobtrusive. He has learned to move with the grace of a dancer or the wariness of a kicked dog, depending on who is asked —Floris once said, with that impassive tone he found so magnetic, that he slithers upright. Her affinity for unloved creatures tinted her words with the warm shade of a compliment, one she accompanied with the long stroke of a fingertip from hipbone to collarbone, as if wanting to elicit the movement. Though most memories of her have begun to wane, that remark remains and echoes with every trudging step.
He sets the thermos down on her desk and moves to turn off the droning speaker. The immediate absence of noise wakes her. “You work too hard.” He’s turned away to put down his own thermos so she cannot see his smile at the little grunt she lets out.
“Where is everyone?”
“Oh, they refused to come in.”
“Why?”
He turns to her. His inability to address her while facing away bothers him greatly; it forces him to stop whatever task busies him when she speaks to him and raise his gaze or turn his head toward her, like a cursed bloom compelled by an imperious sun.
“It’s Saturday.”
Her reply is a lazy nod as she watches him unbutton his sweater. He savors this faux intimacy: hair rumpled, gaze languid, posture unguarded —a sight meant for a lover’s eyes after the night’s passions. So warm and sour the breath of morning’s first words and so willing his tongue to taste it.
“Why did you come in?” Nimble-fingered she opens the thermos, blowing softly into it before taking a sip. Her lower lip, dewy with spit, sticks to the rim for a brief second, baring its soft, fleshy inside and the row of almost too perfectly aligned teeth he’s wished to trace with his thumb too many times to count. He takes his cane and walks toward the window.
“I work too hard.” He’s certain her lip curls behind the mouth of the thermos.
The laboratory, though not as old as Harrenhal, is nigh as dilapidated —the window frames are stubborn and always resist the first attempts at being opened. Once he succeeds, he stands back and lets the spring air gust inside. He turns to watch the flutter of lashes, the still-somnolent reach for the thermos, the long exhalation that precedes a longer draught of coffee.
She rises and stretches briefly. “I’m going to the loo. Go ahead and start.”
It takes her seven strides to exit the office. Thrice as many to get to the women’s toilets. When he’s counted the fourteenth step he hobbles toward her desk. The minuscule malvales he embroidered at the bottom of the cushion —he used a wine-colored thread he filched from one of Lyonel’s wives— greet him with their wound-like petals. He brings the cushion to his face and inhales so deeply he almost feels the mechanics of breath in all their granular detail: the contraction of the diaphragm; the expansion of the lungs; the gaseous exchange in the infinitesimal alveoli of his bronchial sacs.
He becomes full to the brim with her scent, the entirety of his thoracic cavity a vessel for particles from her, of her. His left hand joins the system, albeit externally; palm flat against ribcage, fingertips resting upon the celiac plexus, a habitual gesture she once jokingly called The Heimlich Massage. He cannot recall when he picked it up; after his mother’s death, perhaps, or following Harwin’s, possibly. It’s a gesture that neither adds to his sense of balance nor takes from it —it aims to contain, to bridle, especially in the laboratory, around her. When this restraint fails, he’ll find himself nose-deep and open-mouthed against the cushion he gifted her many Saturday afternoons ago, walking stick out of his grasp, groin prickling with tiny, torturous pulses of want.
He’s had her pressed against him, the bone of her spine parallel to the bone of his sternum, the bromine-hued tresses a shroud upon his brow, a veil that cloaks, that safeguards, that soothes. He’s had their bodies aligned in innumerable ways in his late-afternoon reveries, when the time to head home approaches with terrible celerity and he watches the undulation of her shoulder blades as she reaches up to let her hair down. The cushion is a lifeless proxy that half-soothes his craving, one that, unlike him, knows the feel of her cheeks and the wet of her spit.
With an unsteady hand he puts it back. His cock has stiffened in his trousers and she will be back at any moment, face freshened and mouth rinsed. Fuck, he is so aroused he is forced to rest his hand on her desk so he doesn’t stagger. The last time he indulged this unseemly urge he had the decency to do so in the cloakroom, mouthfuls of tweed making him shut his eyes tightly and open his nostrils widely as his hand unbuckled his belt. He’s well-acquainted with a plethora of her scents: hair fresh-from and days-past a wash; perfume-dashed and sweat-coated nape; shaved and unshaved underarms; it’s a carefully curated index, though marked by an egregious fault: it comprises only the scents above the waist. For the better, probably, since he’s certain a whiff of her cunt would cause an incident not even Orwyle could cover up.
Thick-heeled boots echo down the corridor. Larys shuffles away from her desk and toward the window once more. The morning breeze is chilly but feeble; the cigarette glows intensely with the first drag. She loathes this habit and is always quick to chastise him when she catches him indulging. He enjoys the scolding, playful as it is —she has a regal air about her that grants her judgments, serious and frivolous alike, an authority he has never challenged. Or perhaps his need to submit to her makes him pathetically pliant. The habit remains, in part because he’s never been one to renounce vices easily, in part because he revels in her displeased stare a tad too much.
“You have to stop. It’s not healthy.”
He turns to her, as if yanked by a leash. Her gaze, slumberous no longer, evades his, focusing instead on the dotting flame between his fingers.
“It is a sin to deny our appetites, Dr. Hightower. They are what make us fully alive as mortal men.”
The puffs of smoke he exhales through his nose frame her silhouette. He notices a certain reticence to enter —she’s leaning cross-armed on the doorframe— a severity in her posture that was absent when she left. When she deigns look at him at last, he sees a shadow of trepidation in the ever-ensnaring umber of her eyes. It gleams, faint and ephemeral, before it’s blinked away by still-wet lashes.
“It certainly makes you more mortal, Dr. Strong,” she sentences as she takes the thermos. “Shall we?”
Larys nods, a modest smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He turns to the greenery beyond the window. Spring heralds renewal, rebirth, life.
It also makes for a fine hunting season.